Penn State Professors Get Grant for ‘Fake News’ Detector

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Two Penn State professors have received $300,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop technology that will enable digital devices to weed out “fake news.”

The university says Dongwon Lee, a professor of information sciences and technology, and S. Shyam Sundar, a communications professor, are working on the project.

Lee says, “Fake news has been around for decades” but has been “exacerbated” on Internet and social media platforms.

The professors plan to investigate “characteristic indicators of fake news” and develop complex formulas that will enable digital devices to recognize those indicators and purge stories that contain them from digital devices.

Sundar has researched the psychology of online news consumption for two decades.

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